«How to do things with words», asks Austin. In a way, sophistics or sophistical discursivity is the paradigm of a discourse which does things with words. It is certainly not a simple «rhetorical» action or perlocutionary act, moving listeners via pathê and all kinds of emotions, as Plato tries to define it. It is neither a performative or illocutionary act, as Austin defines it (although his definitions do change and overlap), but nevertheless it does, or it makes, things, and have what I call an « effet-monde ». I shall try to depict this effet-monde, which is more than a simple rhetorical effect of persuasion by starting from the primary scene between Gorgias and Parmenides, between logology (a word borrowed to Novalis) and ontology, or epideixis and (apo)deixis. The Truth and reconciliation Commission in South Africa will provide me an actual example, where, to quote Desmond Tutu, words, language and rhetoric, does things» — contributing to the birth of the new rainbow-people. And my last piece of collective work, the European Vocabulary of Philosophies, dictionary of unstranslatable terms, will show something like the performative impact of plurality of languages and tongues, creating cultures and worlds. The relationship between performance and performativity, and the place of pathê within it, will thus begin to be investigated.

By contrast with interpretations which view Aristotle’s categories as primarily metaphysical notions, the present paper tries to show that the origin of categories lies in the logicolinguistic theory of predication developed notably in the De interpretatione.
In this aim, it focuses on chapter 9 of the first book of the Topics,
from which it extracts the notion of predicative function
, which proves to be the best fitted to account for the signification of Aristotelian categories and brings to light the reason why these can be caracterised as genera of predications, genera of predicates and genera of being. The main purpose of categories thus conceived is to structure experience in order to transform it into a possible object of science.

In the first book of De Natura Deorum
Cicero gives many elements on the Aristotle’s theology. It is in the discussion of Velleius against Aristotle that we found the fragment 26 of De Philosophia,
included in the three Collections of Rose, Walzer and Ross. The interest for this text is due to its content, as well as the unquestionable reference to Aristotle’s lost Dialogue. Although Aristotle’s work has reached us in incomplete form and many important texts are missing, the fragment of Cicero can be seen to occupy an important place in the De Philosophia
as a whole.

Among the most ancient sentences of the early philosophy, Anaximander’s sentence has its unique character: But this is not the only reason why one should take it as one of main sentences in the whole history of philosophy. Anaximander’s sentence launches issues from which philosophy just can’t get away, since it is a sentence that, for the first time ever, philosophy deals with the question of time. In the first appearance, time is understood as khrónos,
originating itself as an essential crossroad between being and becoming. Taken the antithetical and paradoxical character of such a crossroad, one might say that, in Anaximander, the above mentioned relation between being and becoming will be also responsible for the first purely philosophical conceptualization of tragedy.

This paper intends to show how tragic plot arouses pleasure. The tragic framework arouses two painful emotions: pity and fear in the spectator or reader, and such emotions are described as pain in the Poetics and in the Rhetoric. Nevertheless, Aristotle tells us that tragic mimesis originating an inherent pleasure. The arising question is: how tragic actions have lead to the painful outcome arouses pleasure.

For the ancient stoicism, man is nature. According to one of its basic principles, the nature gives to man all the conditions in order to follow it. And following nature is the superlative degree of areté.
However, man fatally moves away from nature not being he, therefore, virtuous. Why man not follows what he really is? To answer this question, we have to identify what prevents man to follow nature. According to the Stoics, passions are responsible for the disturbances in the soul. The disorders can lead the soul to judge incorrectly, and not judge in accordance with the phýsis,
that is, according to his own being. Thus, we intend to show that the Stoics believe that the soul can be disturbed. Therefore, should be improved in order to learn to deal with the pathémata,
keeping in line with the correct lógos.

Considering Plato’s myth of Er in Republic
and how each choice of future lifes by lots of different souls happens, we can see multiple levels of listening proper to the practice of passion. The exemplar choice of Odysseus’ soul reveals a philosophical (serene) connection with the passions. But Odysseus shows himself like a sophist too, like a rhetoric par excellence,
able of total persuasion. That’s what is evident in the second Chant of Iliad.
There, he knows how to move the passions. The Aristotle’s Rhetoric
is directly connected with all this problems concerning the mobility of the passions.

After briefly recalling the Nicomachean Ethics’
view on the ways in which the passions can be appropriate, inappropriate or malignant, the paper considers whether, how and with what justification this understanding can be reconciled with the roles passions take in other domains, including rhetoric, poetics and politics. The paper argues that the appropriateness or inappropriateness of passion type and occurrence over diverse domains is not determined by a general or ethical notion of appropriateness, but can vary with the domain in question. How this can make sense is considered, with examples offered to illustrate and justify this understanding. Even so, cases in which what is inappropriate or appropriate in one domain is at odds with another seem problematic, especially where one of the domains concerns ethics. Two strategies for making sense of this are offered, with one argued to be most promising. Even so, features of Aristotle’s thinking about the malignant passion envy remain problematic.